A Terrible Country

I want to keep on top of our Russian situation but I also need to maintain my mental health. So instead of Masha Gessen’s documentary-type account of post-Soviet life, I picked up her little brother’s comic-novel treatment of the same topic. It’s the story of Andrew/Andrei, a hockey-loving post doc who moves to Moscow to care for his grandmother. Having emigrated to America when he was six and the USSR was still intact, Andrei isn’t “an idiot. But neither was [he] not an idiot” about the new Russia. In an unadorned dude-speak that I found funny and endearing, Andrei tells how he adapts to, as his grandma has always said, this “terrible country,” where might makes rich—and doesn’t care about right (or human rights). He loses his accent, but he can’t shake an essentially American trust in Justice—a dangerous liability under Putin’s regime. I think I’ll pick up big sister Masha’s book next.